Thought, Systems Consulting & Engineering, Inc. Releases "Project Estimating & Tracking for the Rational Unified Process® (PET4RUP)": The Project Estimating Solution

PET4RUP enables project managers to estimate and track costs and effort associated with Rational Unified Process® software projects using two common off the shelf (COTS) software products already in use by most project managers, the Microsoft® Excel® and Project® productivity applications.

Pasadena, MD (PRWEB) July 10, 2003 -- Thought, Systems Consulting & Engineering, Inc. announced today the immediate availability of its new software project estimating system, Project Estimating & Tracking for the Rational Unified Process® (PET4RUP)". Based on Rational Unified Process® (RUP®) itself and developed and used internally by Thought over the past five years, PET4RUP is a set of templates and an estimating methodology that leverages the flexibility and availability of two common off the shelf (COTS) software products already in use by most project managers, the Microsoft® Excel® and Project® productivity applications.

Under wide spread adoption by the global development community, the RUP® methodology is especially useful for Object-Oriented, Component, and Web Services development. However, RUP® doesnt resolve the statistical needs for producing effort or cost estimates and work breakdown structures. Perhaps the most difficult task for project managers, architects and team leaders of software development projects is the formation of the estimates for their durations and costs associated with them. Although great strides have been made towards engineering software and managing the development processes, limited gains have been made towards helping them determine the three basic statistics needed for business cases and project plans: how much, how long, and how many people?

These tasks can be daunting, but are also critical to properly planning a project, especially in setting realistic expectations as to the cost and scope of effort required. Without a firm grasp of these factors, a project can be under funded, under staffed, and expected for delivery before it is physically possible to complete.

PET4RUP presents a bottom up methodology for estimating costs, durations and staffing requirements based on extending RUP® processes in terms of the artifacts and activities required to complete the project. With the supplied Microsoft® Excel® templates, the first rough estimate is just a matter of completing the Use-Case Survey" and using the Effort - Durations by Role" chart, one of many defined charts, to determine the number of project team members required.

Making modifications to the estimation factors worksheets, the estimates can be custom tailored to the development case in use on the project. Those estimates are dynamically link to the accompanying Microsoft® Project® template creating an integrated work breakdown schedule. One of the most useful features of the supplied views and charts are that they can be embedded in and linked to the Business Case, Project Plan and Iteration Plan documents. Since the data is in Excel®, it is also possible to develop custom views and graphs as needed, as well as easily export to other applications.

Finally, with the project team using the included project tracking worksheet templates, the project manager can monitor actualities against the projections. Just as the Rational Unified Process® brought standardized processes to software development, finally elevating its practice to real engineering and vastly improving its management, PET4RUP now brings a new set of processes to software project estimating and tracking using COTS tools. How much? How long? How many people? These questions can now be answered with more controllable precision than ever before.

The PET4RUP estimating system is available online for pre-purchase review at http://www.thoughts.net/PET4RUP. A single user license is $199.95 inclusive of applicable sales taxes. Enterprise Licenses are available. For further information contact Thought, Systems Consulting & Engineering, Inc. 414 Metropolitan Blvd., Pasadena, MD 21122 or phone (443) 562-6482.

PET4RUP, The Project Estimating Solution"

Rational Unified Process® and RUP® are registered trademarks of International Business Machines., Inc. Excel® and Project® are registered trademarks of Microsoft, Inc. The trademarks herein are the property of their respective companies.